


Inflamed

by StarsCrackedOpen (Misthia)



Series: Things Carried, Unseen [21]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: Attraction, Best Friends, Denial of Feelings, F/M, Force Bond (Star Wars), Friendship, Missions Gone Wrong, Partnership, Pre-Relationship, Slow Burn, Space Flight
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-06
Updated: 2020-08-06
Packaged: 2021-03-05 22:14:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,178
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25742647
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Misthia/pseuds/StarsCrackedOpen
Summary: They say space is cold. It is, but in hyperspace, engines on full,coldisn’t what Anakin and Ahsoka need to worry about.Or: In which the Twilight is malfunctioning, and Ahsoka thinks she must be too.
Relationships: Anakin Skywalker & Ahsoka Tano, Anakin Skywalker/Ahsoka Tano
Series: Things Carried, Unseen [21]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1839160
Comments: 15
Kudos: 198





	Inflamed

**Author's Note:**

> Me again. Most of them are borne as an idea based on a line in another. This one is a take on the classic survival through the cold, sharing heat, etc., with a twist. For any Americans who aren’t familiar with Celsius:
> 
> 0º C = 32º F  
> 10º C = 50º F  
> 20º C = 68º F  
> 30º C = 86º F  
> 40º C = 104º F  
> 45º C = 113º F  
> 50º C = 122º F
> 
> Takes place probably around roughly the same timeframe as “Catch A Wave” — definitely much later in the series, near the end of the original run. There’s attraction, but no acting on it by either party (for a LOT of reasons), so definitely pre-ship. If that’s not something you want to see, maybe skip this one — the next one will be more ambiguous bonding and less charged. I almost set this off on its own as part of the AU I’m sketching out, but for now it’ll live here. 
> 
> Not angsty, not fluffy, just some realizations neither probably thought they’d have, under unusual circumstances.

* * *

They were one rotation into a three rotation jump across Separatist space when Ahsoka noticed something was...off. She turned from the navicomp to her master. “Does it seem kind of...warm to you?”

He frowned. “Now that you mention it, it does.” He checked the environmental controls, brow furrowing. “Nothing showing an error yet. We’ll keep an eye on it.” Ahsoka peered over. Where the ship was usually kept at 20 degrees, it was currently 24.5.

It climbed slowly through the day — 27, 29, 29.5. By the time they were turning in for the night, it had stopped, resting at 32 degrees for the prior three hours. Anakin checked the system again. It was throwing an error, the same one it had started to throw at 27 degrees, but not a critical one.And the temperature wasn’t rising anymore.

He eyed the air ducts appraisingly. “Seems to be holding steady now. I’ll check the cooling systems tomorrow, they probably just need recharging.”

Ahsoka nodded and toed off her boots, but knew it would still be too warm for her to fall asleep easily, and unlike Anakin, she didn’t have many layers to shed.

She unbuckled her bracers and slid into her bunk, pulling up the blanket just long enough to shimmy out of her leggings under it. She tossed them with her bracers on top of the locker at the foot of the bunk, then laid back down on top of the thin blanket, more comfortable.

Anakin was still puttering around in his full robes. She watched him, a little incredulous.

“Master, how are you even able to breathe in all _that,_ in _this_ heat?”

He was quiet for a moment, then shrugged. “On Tatooine, it got much hotter.” Surprised at the mention of his native planet, Ahsoka simply nodded.

“‘Night, Ahsoka.” He hit the lights and rolled into his bunk without another word.

* * *

Ahsoka dreamt of fire. It roared and closed in on her, and she woke up, struggling to breathe, drenched in sweat, and realizing the temperature had soared — it had to be at least 40 degrees. She peered over at her master’s bunk and could tell that it was empty.

Clambering to her feet, she grabbed a canteen of water, drinking deeply and then re-filling it. She didn’t bother with her leggings or bracers, feet bare on the strangely warm deck plates. For the first time, she missed her old midriff-baring clothing. A little gingerly, she made her way to the bridge. They were still in hyperspace, but her master wasn’t there, and so she headed down to the engineering level.

She stepped inside to find her master at the far wall, sitting in front of a opened utility hatch. Parts surrounded him, tools were strewn about, and a messy heap of dark fabric laid nearby. Anakin was stripped to the waist, back gleaming with sweat and the muscles of his shoulders straining as he worked at something she couldn’t see.

Her mouth suddenly went dry. The heat was _clearly_ getting to her.

She stepped forward, and he looked back at her as he reached for something, shoulder-deep in the open panel. “Heya, Snips.”

Wordlessly, she offered him the canteen, which he took with a look of gratitude and drained in a single go. She sat down next to him, peering at the innards of what she assumed was the ship’s climate system, then looking back to him. He hunched over for a moment — arms on his knees, catching his breath — then straightened, running his hands through his damp hair to push it out of his flushed face. She noticed absently that he’d left his glove on. Her face grew warmer, somehow, and she looked back at the panel. _It’s just the heat._

“What’s wrong with it?” She asked.

“A housing was cracked, and one of the converters burned out. An alarm tripped when it hit 35 degrees. The system isn’t properly shedding heat from the engines, and it’s overheating the ship.” He grimaced. “I took the system offline to try and patch the crack, but the system _knows_ the converter is broken, so now it won’t turn back on —”

Her head swiveled back to him. “Which is why the temperature’s spiked so high, so quickly.”

Anakin nodded. “I’ve been trying to bypass it.”

Ahsoka shook her head. “If it’s from the engines, we can drop out of hyperspace—”

“We’d end up in hostile territory. That said, we won’t have much choice if I can’t get this bypass into place. It’s already 44 in here.”

She believed it. The heat felt like a living thing, ready to devour them. _“Forty-four?”_ She turned to look at the compartment again. On a ship, there were no breezes to keep any level of comfort at higher temperatures.

“Well, we still have fifteen or so degrees until it becomes lethal.”

“ _That’s_ comforting.”

He sobered as she turned back to him. “If we have to drop out, we’ll be a sitting duck. Thrusters will get us to the nearest planet, but even that generates heat. We’d have to coast as much as possible.”

She swallowed. “We better get it fixed then.”

He nodded and rummaged behind him, picking up a work light he held up as they looked into the system. Ahsoka peered over the arm holding the lamp as he reached in. “See the converter?” She leaned in closer, her lekku brushing his arm, sending a shiver through her that she ignored. _It’sjusttheheat._ She pulled back slightly as she nodded.

“I can reach the release switches, but only one at a time, and they both need to be pressed at once. The space is too narrow. But...” He trailed off as he eyed her arms. “You might be able to fit.”

She nodded, feeling suddenly very strange with his eyes on her, and wondering if it was hotter than they realized and she was simply suffering heatstroke. Yes. That’s probably what it was.

They switched positions. He directed her as she reached into the panel, holding the light and leaning in, and Ahsoka found it very hard to concentrate on what he was saying while his hot breath ghosted over her montrals. “It should be right _there._ ”

 _Focus,_ she told herself.

She nodded and reached in with her right arm, able to hook her fingers around one of the two releases, but not the second, even as she stretched. She shook her head. “The right one is too deep.” Anakin sighed.

“And I couldn’t fit both arms — here, hold the left, I’ll try to get the right—”

He came over to her right side and squeezed in next to her with his left arm. They were pressed from shoulder to nearly wrist, skin on skin. Their faces were almost cheek to cheek, breathing each other’s air. His arm was blazingly hot, as she would have expected, but the sudden intensification she felt of their Force-bond, she had _not_. It felt to her as if the physical contact was focusing it like light through a lens. She risked glancing at him for a split second out of the corner of her eye, and saw a muscle in his jaw jumping.

Suddenly Ahsoka didn’t think it was just _her_ perception.

The bond had always been stronger with proximity, and physical contact had often reinforced that — his hand on her shoulder, her hand patting his. A hug when death had been narrowly avoided. Once, when he’d been ill in the field, her cool palm stroking his forehead through fever. They'd shared blankets and beds, leaned against each other and huddled together under cloaks. They'd exchanged many kinds of touch in their time together; comfortable, comforting, and familiar. But _this_ time, and she wasn’t sure why — or maybe she was but would _not_ think about it — it felt different. And not only in the Force.

“All right,” his voice cut through her reverie, a little rougher than usual. “On three. One, two, _three!_ ”

They both pushed the switches, and with a loud _click_ the converter released. Anakin caught it, angling it out and putting it aside. He swiped at his forehead with his arm, and picked up the flex pipe he planned to put in the converter’s place.

“Next part. Hold the tubing out of the way, would you?”

Ahsoka knelt in front of the panel and pulled the stiff bundle down and away as he awkwardly maneuvered around and over her, hovering somewhere above her head.

She made the mistake of looking up and saw the tendons tensing in his throat, his arms flexing on either side of her montrals as he tried to fit the new piece in the space.

Her stomach tightened, not unpleasantly. She reinforced her shields reflexively, cursing her suddenly treacherous body, the heat, and the Twilight in general, fixing her vision to the tubes she was holding.

She felt herself flush. _It’s. The. HEAT,_ she told herself firmly, for the umpteenth time. _The heat is getting to you._

Something deeply buried in the back of her mind whispered that to be false, and she roughly shoved it back where it came from, with all the other stray thoughts a person might have, far away from the surface and their bond. _No._

As if on cue, the feeling disappeared when she felt a warm spot bloom on her montral. She looked up again, scowling now. Sweat was running down his face...and onto _her._

“Eugh! You’re _dripping_ on me.”

His Adam’s apple bobbed above her as he huffed a laugh. In spite of the very real danger, it was an absurd situation. “Sorry. It’s not,” —he pulled on a coupler with a grunt, and a few more drops splashed her montrals as it locked into place — “intentional.”

There was silence for the next few minutes as he worked over her and she held still, so _still,_ and tried not to brush his bare skin or think about it. They had seen each other, across the past couple of years, in various states of undress — but almost always in the context of injury, and usually on the battlefield. It was to bandage a bleed or salve a burn, with no time to think about anything other than the wound. Now, the threat wasn’t quite as immediate, and she could feel just how _close_ his skin was. She could smell _him_ under the sweat and machine oil — both familiar and somehow now heightened. As comfortable as they undeniably were around each other, there was a new facet to her physical awareness of him that she did not want to consider.

She wouldn’t acknowledge it. She could meditate on it later, much, _much_ later. In fact, she wouldn’t _need_ to, because it was _just the HEAT!_ She bent her focus entirely upon the danger they would be in if this didn’t work, and the danger they were in now.

“You can let go,” came Anakin’s voice, and she ducked under his arm and sat to the side, wiping his sweat from her montrals. He made a few more adjustments, pulling on the piece to make sure it held, and rolled back onto his heels. He sighed and stood up fully, dropping the vibrotool and holding a hand out to help her up. She took it with a sudden and alien trepidation, but let him pull her to her feet. “Moment of truth,” he said.

Anakin made his way to the central console of the room, restarting the cooling system. It whirred protestingly and then hummed as it came to life, and he came back to kneel in front of the panel to check the connections as it did. Ahsoka walked under the nearest vent, putting a hand up to it. After a tense couple of minutes the air flowing through started to cool, and she turned to him and smiled, relief bouncing across their link. Anakin flopped back onto the deck, triumphant and exhausted.

After a minute of relaxing in the cooling air, she made her way over to where he was stretched out on the floor. He turned his head at her approach, and she didn’t miss the way his eyes skimmed briefly up her bare legs on the way to her face, then looked away abruptly.

_Oh._

Face studiously _normal,_ she held out a hand to him as he had a few minutes prior. He swallowed, and took it, and she helped him up, palm tingling at the contact.

The bond was strangely quiet between them in that moment, but there was a new undercurrent neither dared acknowledge.

Anakin turned and picked up his tunics, throwing them over his shoulder and heading back up the crew level, Ahsoka a step behind him as usual. He spoke, and she wasn’t sure if it was to her, or himself.“When we get back, I am going to take the longest shower of my _life._ ”

 _Yes,_ Ahsoka thought, very much privately and refusing to consider whatever was firing in her hindbrain and humming between them. _A cold one._

**_Fin._ **

**Author's Note:**

> Based roughly in truth — space shuttles generate ENORMOUS amounts of heat from the engines, and often the biggest difficulty is offsetting that so you don’t cook the passengers.
> 
> This one took a while to work out, and I’m not 100% on it — it might eventually get reworked into that possible AU. But I think it’s not uncommon to suddenly look at someone one day, maybe under unusual circumstances, and realize you find them attractive. Whether or not that’s acted on is a different story. And they’re both teenagers/young adults who have spent a LOT of time together, so I can imagine this happening.


End file.
